Google releases OS code to open source community

By Kris Sangani

Published Friday, November 20, 2009

Search engine giant Google has announced that it is to submit its upcoming operating system, Chromium OS, to the open source community a year before the company makes it available to the general public.

The Chromium OS project will include their current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development.

“This is the initial sketch and we will colour it in over the course of the next year,” company said in a statement on their website.

In July Google announced that it was working on Google Chrome OS, an open source operating system for people who spend most of their time on the web.

The new operating system will be a radical departure from existing PC operating systems. For example, all the applications will be executed within the browser and there will be no conventional desktop applications – meaning that users will not have to deal with installing, managing and updating software.

Each application will be contained within a security sandbox making in order to make it difficult for malware and viruses to infect a computer.

Every time a computer running Chromium boots up, the OS verifies the integrity of its code. If the operating system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with a reboot.

The company also says it will optimise many operations, run everything possible in parallel and specify reference hardware components to speed up the user’s experience.

Google says it will also be contributing its code upstream and engaging with other open source initiatives such as Linux and Ubuntu.

The operating system is expected to be available before the end of 2010.